‘I’ve heard you say more than once history is all of a piece.’
‘So it is, if it’s taught properly. But the exam syllabuses don’t even acknowledge the twentieth century. There wasn’t a single damned question on it in last summer’s Cambridge senior papers.’
‘I daresay all those old buffers who set them regard what happened between 1914 and 1918 as another Crimea. They’ll get around to it in time.’
‘But that’s the point,’ he said, ‘there isn’t time, at least, not if we waste it, the way those bloody politicians did at Versailles last summer. That treaty is an absolute shambles. Jerry was saddled with the entire responsibility for the war, and any chance of a just peace was lost in a sordid haggle for territory and reparations. There must be some way of putting that over.’
‘In a text-book, you mean?’
‘No, but in a book written in language an intelligent seventeen-year-old could follow without yawning.’
She had a mild inspiration then, arising out of one of the first conversations they had had when he introduced her to Margaret of Anjou. She said, ‘If you feel it that deeply you’re the person to write it, Davy. Start tomorrow!’ and he replied, looking at her with his head on one side, ‘Me? Oh, go easy, Beth. It’s a job for a political journalist, based on London, with access to state papers and inside contacts.’
‘Why is it? You went through the war and you were born and raised in a Welsh valley, where your father and two brothers died for somebody’s greed. I think you’ve got better qualifications than any journalist or academic. Besides, you’re a born teacher. Anyone spending a day in your company would concede that.’
He lounged over and sat on the hearthrug, leaning his weight against her knees. ‘Get along with you, you think I’m capable of anything, Beth.’
‘So you are. And I’m not the only one.’
‘Who else, apart from Mam, over at Pontnewydd?’
‘The head, and Howarth. Both of them are much older than you but that doesn’t stop them looking to you for a lead sometimes.’
‘A lead? In what cause, for God’s sake?’
‘Against the diehards, the people who think the clock was put back four years the day the war ended. But not only them. They’re no problem really because they’ll soon die off. It’s the group around Carter I mean, people who escaped the war but are already looking on the job in an entirely different way from you or Algy, or even dear old stick-in-the-muds like Cordwainer. This place seems united enough on the surface but it isn’t really, you know. Different people are trying to steer it different ways. You believe in real education, in letting boys develop their individuality, but Carter and some of the others don’t. They’re only interested in exam results. There’s a conflict here. Even I can see that, after four months. In fact, I can probably see it more clearly than you because I’m outside, looking in on all but the frolics.’
It struck him that she was extraordinarily bright for a girl not yet twenty. Sometimes it puzzled him a little. Where did her perception and natural intelligence come from? Not from her stolid old father, certainly, and a couple of years as a hospital probationer wouldn’t account for it. He said, unconsciously expressing his line of thought, ‘How old were you when your mother died, Beth?’
‘Seven. Why?’
‘Remember much about her?’
‘Not a lot. I remember she wore the trousers in our house. Father was quite helpless when she died. Esther and I didn’t blame him marrying the first eligible woman who caught his eye, and Nell and I have always got along. She was a good stepmother, as stepmothers go. Why, what are you driving at?’
‘You. Your way of looking at things, and seeing more than the average person would see. I think your mother must have been quite a person. How about your grandparents on her side?’
‘He was a Methodist minister, and gran was a school teacher in one of the first elementary schools, but I don’t remember either of them clearly. Longevity isn’t a strong suit in the McLeods.’
He had forgotten she had Scots ancestry and this might account for all manner of things. Her earnestness, for instance, her forthrightness and preoccupation with abstract ideas, watered down by the Cockney strain on her father’s side, and a Cockney upbringing that would develop a latent sense of humour. Her directness flashed out again now as she said, ‘You’re side tracking. It’s a weakness of antiquarians and you’re particularly prone to it. We’re talking about you, Davy, not my family tree. Didn’t I hear Algy or Howarth say something about you doing a thesis for your degree?’
‘Not for my B.A. I’d have to get that first and turn in a thesis for Master of Arts.’
‘Right. We’ll take it from there. I’ll get that corner fixed up as a study as soon as the snow lets up. You start swotting for your B.A. and you’ve already got a theme for your thesis – “The Gaderene Rush” or “How-we-got-into-the-pickle-in-the-First-Place”. I’ll keep you at it. I want to be a helpmate, not just a bedmate and a brood mare. Pull me up and rake those ashes down.’
They left it there for the time being but she held to her purpose and the new year saw him installed in his inglenook, where he could get the benefit of the fire in a room of persistent draughts. It took him a little time to get used to working there, with her rustling about in the background, unconsciously diverting him by her over-solicitous efforts to do everything quietly so that he said, chuckling, ‘You don’t have to walk on tiptoe and practise controlled breathing. My first two terms I taught a class adjoining that poor devil Meredith, before he got his marching orders. It was like teaching in the crater of a volcano.’
After that she relaxed and he was able to lose himself in study and analysis, working steadily until the little French clock her stepmother had given them chimed nine thirty, when she came in with the cocoa and the bread and cheese.
But then, in the third week of January, Bamfylde erupted again, and what old Howarth called the “tight-rope-term” began, meaning the cold, blustery period between late January and mid-March, when inches of rain could fall in twenty-four hours, and the school was often shrouded in seeping mist. Sometimes the weather was so vile that the football field became a quagmire and matches had to be cancelled, but the runs went on. Nobody minded getting plastered with black Exmoor mud if it meant an afternoon’s change of scene.
By that time, of course, Beth, in her own phrase, was beginning to look more and more like a penguin, and kept to the house, fearing a fall and disastrous consequences. But she remained very cheerful and knitted, he thought, enough tiny garments to supply a city orphanage, an occupation that seemed to bring a repose that by passed him. For, towards the end of term, his mind was switched from her, and the winter discomforts of the cottage, by a confrontation that he was reluctant to confide in her. It was another and more serious clash with the Carter faction, highlighting her feeling that Bamfylde was indeed being pulled in opposing directions.
3
It was a deeper quarrel than the initial one, arising from his refusal to join the Corps, and left him with a sense of unease that augured badly for the future. It became known, in Bamfylde history, as ‘The War Memorial Spuddle’, ‘spuddle’ being a local word signifying a dispute between two rival parties.
It began on a relatively civilised level but quickly deteriorated into a sour, ding-dong battle, with himself and Howarth ranged on one side, Carter and the traditionalists on the other, and Algy Herries poised in a position of uncomfortable neutrality.
The controversy stemmed from the offer of Alderman Blunt, of Challacombe, to donate five hundred pounds for the setting up of a memorial to Bamfylde’s war dead, an offer that was accepted by the Governors without prior conditions. Blunt was a local war profiteer, a timber merchant who, as Howarth put it, had been a twopenny-ha’penny supplier of builders’ materials before August, 1914, but had burgeoned, in a matter of six years, into a magnate, with a yard, a country house set in a forty-acre country estate, an enormous Rolls-Royce, and a grand ma
nner, far more impressive than that of old Hopgood, head of the Bamfylde landowning family with roots in the Middle Ages. Carter had spent a great deal of time and patience cultivating Blunt, and enlisting him as a patron of the school. He was therefore inclined to take upon himself the credit of finding the finance for a splendid memorial to the Old Boys and in making the gesture public somehow implied that he, personally, was giving the money.
Ordinarily it would have been a matter for the headmaster and Governors alone, but a special committee had been set up to consider the provision of a memorial, and both Carter and David had been co-opted on to it, the one representing the housemasters, the other the Old Boys’ Association.
At its first meeting the committee were asked to consider three designs submitted by Blunt’s tame architect. They were conventional monuments, a plain stone cross, to be erected at the head of the east drive, a bronze statue of an infantryman in battle order, and a more pretentious design featuring an angel poised on a globe representing the embattled world. David, already nursing a profound prejudice against the rash of memorials sweeping the country, spoke out against all of them.
‘As an ex-serviceman,’ he said, ‘I’m qualified to express an opinion on this. These things are meaningless. If five hundred pounds is going to be spent on a memorial to the dead why can’t we spend it on something practical?’
‘Such as what?’ demanded Carter, sharply.
David was ready for this. ‘A gymnasium to replace the old covered playground. The installation of modern cooking equipment in the kitchen. Even a dynamo down by the piggeries, to provide us with our own electricity.’
Algy Herries seemed impressed by the alternatives. ‘What do you say to that, Carter? Seems worth considering, doesn’t it?’
‘With respect, no, Headmaster,’ Carter said, ‘because it’s out of step with the sentiment behind the gift. Mr Blunt wouldn’t favour it, I’m sure of that.’
‘You could consult him on the matter,’ David suggested, and Carter, seeing the head undecided, said he would do this, but was obviously delighted to inform the next meeting of the committee that his forecast had been correct.
Alderman Blunt, he reported, had now expressed a preference for the stone cross, inscribed with the eighty-odd names.
‘Well, that’s that,’ Herries said, philosophically, but David, nettled, said one aspect had been overlooked. ‘I think we should get the views of Old Boys before we accept,’ he said. ‘Nearly a hundred fell but six times that number served and survived. I propose we put it to the O.B.A. general meeting at Whitsun and get their views.’
At this point old Bouncer, representing the church, rose to his feet and surveyed the meeting benignly under his useless spectacles. ‘Offer might be withdrawn by then,’ he said. ‘Settle for the bird in hand. That’s my notion. Eh, eh, Carter?’
‘My sentiments exactly,’ Carter said. ‘We don’t want to give Mr Blunt the idea we’re looking a gift horse in the mouth. I’ll move an amendment that we accept the money now and get the work in hand right away.’
The amendment was put and carried, four votes to one, Herries as chairman, abstaining, and that should have been that, and would have been had David accepted his defeat gracefully. He would not, however, and sought the advice of Howarth, who said, sourly, ‘Since you seem determined to put a spoke in Carter’s wheel, I’ll give you some free advice, P.J. Can’t stand the little squirt. Never could, although, for my part, I don’t care a damn whether a gift from a man of Blunt’s reputation is a stone cross or a supply of gold inkwells. His money’s tainted and I wouldn’t want it to feed starving children. The fellow’s a frightful bounder!’ and in a few acid phrases he outlined, for David’s edification, Blunt’s spectacular rise in the world. ‘Your best bet is to contact the Old Boys personally. Get out a circular letter on the duplicator, and ask for replies within the week. Then, if a majority support your view, throw the statistics at them.’ And this is what David did, sending out more than four hundred and fifty letters, and enclosing stamped addressed envelopes.
The response was gratifying. Within a week he received nearly four hundred replies. Eighty-seven per cent of them backed his proposal, favouring a memorial of some practical value to the school.
Armed with his figures he asked Herries to call a special meeting of the subcommittee and made his circular public, but Carter, forewarned, produced an ace from his sleeve in the person of Blunt himself, a florid, ponderous man, who struck David as a truculent peasant using his unexpected wealth to whip the shoulders of all the locals who remembered his hand-to-mouth days. Faced with the result of the postal poll Blunt said, without preamble, that when he proposed a memorial he meant a memorial, not an addition to the school that would lose its identity as soon as it was built or installed. There was nothing David could do but back down and if Carter had left it there the whole thing would have been forgotten by the time the cross was unveiled at the dedication service Herries had planned.
That was not Carter’s way, however. Determined to savour his triumph he buttonholed David in the quad on the first day of the summer term, and said, with counterfeit affability, ‘Word in your ear, Powlett-Jones, and I hope you’ll take it the way it’s meant. You’re comparatively new here, so you can’t be expected to know how to handle the locals like Blunt. It so happens I do, not because I’ve spent ten years of my life here – aside from that spell in the army, of course – but because I’m West Country born. I know these chaps, believe me. Played the right way they can be damned useful to us. Blunt is rolling in money, and he loves kudos like a cat loves cream. Fine, let’s humour him. Let’s get all we can out of him. He’ll end by endowing us handsomely if he’s left to me.’
‘You want his kind of money that much?’
‘Why the devil not? It’s as good as anyone else’s money, isn’t it?’
‘No, it isn’t,’ David growled, ‘it’s come from soaking the Government when they had no alternative but to pay anything men like Blunt had the nerve to demand. I hate the bastards who sat tight and made fortunes in the war. I’ve got a hell of a sight more time for the conscientious objectors.’
Carter blinked at him. His eyes, David noticed for the first time, were angry, ferrety eyes, red-rimmed, as though to match his rust-coloured hair. Suddenly, inexplicably if he had been able to contemplate it in a rational mood, David discovered that he hated him.
‘That’s a high moral tone to take at your age,’ Carter said, in the voice he used to subdue mutinous spirits of the Fifth. ‘Why not go down to Blunt’s bank and ask the manager if you can sniff his pennies one by one? Just in order to satisfy yourself none of them are tainted?’
‘I don’t have to, I know they are. I slept in barrack huts men like Blunt provided. They were built of unseasoned timber that worked out at about five bob a foot. The men who inhabited those rabbit-hutches – when they were lucky, that is – were getting a shilling a day, for keeping Blunt and his like from being walked over by Prussian jackboots. To hell with Blunt and everybody like Blunt! I feel like spitting every time I pass his bloody memorial, and you can tell him so if you care to!’
‘But I don’t, old man,’ Carter said, easily, ‘I’ve better manners,’ and drifted off, clearly quite unruffled.
It soon got around, as everything of that kind always did in a place like Bamfylde. A garbled version too, as David realised when Howarth drawled, ‘Hear you’re likely to be running short on saliva as soon as that shroud comes off the war memorial, Powlett-Jones. Not wise, I think, to empty your chamber at a tyke like Carter. Better to leave a shot or two in reserve. You’ll have more trouble with him, so take a tip from a veteran common room skirmisher like myself.’
‘How the hell is one to handle a man like Carter?’ asked David, thoroughly exasperated. ‘He knows it all, doesn’t he?’
‘He doesn’t know me,’ Howarth said, ‘and that’s encouraged him to keep out of my way for years. In a place like this you don’t fight with drawn swords, my bo
y. You find a nice little spot behind a chimney pot and snipe. Imagine me telling you about sniping! However, you’re not a fool and you’ll learn. Providing you stay long enough, that is.’
It was odd how persistently his defeat at the hands of Carter nagged at him, and it wasn’t long before Beth dragged it out in the open, demanding to hear the full story. She said, when he declared that he intended looking for a new situation the moment he had taken his degree, ‘That’s silly, Davy, and if you think about it you’ll see it is. There’ll be a Carter in every school, and if you mean to stay in the profession you’d better face the fact. Howarth’s right. It’s your tactics that are amateur. You never want to give the Carters of this world an opening. I wish you’d told me about this before.’
‘Do you think I wanted to worry you at a time like this?’
‘Pooh,’ she said, ‘a time like what? Life has to go on, doesn’t it? But, in any case, I’ve news that should take your mind off Carter and Mr Blunt for a spell. Doc Willoughby was here this afternoon and brought a friend of his. A gynaecologist from Bristol.’
His jaw dropped and he looked so dismayed that she yelped with laughter. ‘Oh, David, don’t keel over! It’s not that bad; at least, I don’t think it is. Tell me, are there any twins in your family?’
‘Twins! Good God… are you sure? …Is Willoughby and that Bristol chap?’
‘More or less, I think, but doing well so they tell me. No wonder I was such a size. I was beginning to think of discarding the name “David” for “Goliath”. Now it’ll have to be David and Jonathan.’
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